09/09/2019
This standout debut from Chilean author Fernández dexterously tells the story of a group of Chilean friends haunted by the absence of their old classmate and friend, Estrella González, who left their school as they grew up during the Pinochet dictatorship. Years later, the friends all remember Estrella differently. Fuenzalida remembers her voice; Maldonado dreams about the letters Estrella sent to her (three of which are in the text); Riquelme remembers going to Estrella’s house to play Space Invaders and witnessing Estrella’s father, a high-ranking officer for Pinochet, remove his wooden prosthetic hand after he got home from work. The narrative eventually winds its way to revealing what happened to Estrella. Fernández’s masterstroke is her remarkable structure: the novella is related in fragments that drift and remain unreliable, which evokes the pervasive fear and uncertainty of life under Pinochet. “Time isn’t straightforward, it mixes everything up, shuffles the dead, merges them, separates them out again.... Whether we were there or not is no longer clear.... we’re left with traces of the dream, like the vestiges of a doomed naval battle.” Fernández’s outstanding novel explores the nature of memory and dreams, and how after a certain point, they become indistinguishable. (Nov.)
Nona Fernández's Space Invaders, translated into English by the masterful Natasha Wimmer and nominated for a National Book Award, is as addictive as its video game namesake. . . . Each [chapter] slides by quickly, but lingers like a dream.”—NPR.com
“Nona Fernández is perhaps the hippest Chilean writer since Roberto Bolaño (with whom she shares a translator). . . . Short, stylish, and engrossing, this is a stellar book from a writer who should be on your radar.”—GQ.com
“In short poetic chapters in which layers of meaning and emotion are compressed into each sentence, Fernández illustrates one more devastating way autocracy robs people, when it steals their ability to ever know for sure what reality is, or was.”—Salon.com
“Taut and evocative, award-winning Chilean author Fernández’s [Space Invaders] shows how a dictatorship works from within to shape lives.”—BBC Culture
“There is a wonderful fogginess to Fernández’s gorgeous prose, in this novella translated faultlessly by Natasha Wimmer, whose experience translating the works of Roberto Bolaño and understanding of Latin America’s traumatic history with dictatorships aid her in rendering clarity without removing the elements that help Space Invaders do so much, so quickly.”—New York Journal of Books
“A nimble tale told in letters and the shared recollections of now-distant childhood friends, Fernández’s book presents a devastating portrait of the trauma that a savage, rapacious government inflicted on a community and a country.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Space Invaders reveals how a child’s memory of a tragedy can accurately reflect the pain of the experience even when it does not necessarily reflect the truth.”—ZYZZYVA
“Space Invaders is a compelling and insightful work of literature from a truly talented fiction writer.”—Words Without Borders
“[The] length and the intensity of the structure, which introduces so much in such a short span, is a bit like a dream itself. You come out of it, blinking, a little confused, a little scared, certainly devastated, but feeling like you’ve already forgotten the most important threads. The structure is brilliant, as it needs to be with such a difficult approach to narrative-building. There is incredible compression here, and at the same time the gaps between chapters and sections, the space between the days and years and the dreamers themselves, stretches wide.”—Full Stop
“Like compatriot Alia Trabucco Zerán's recently published novel The Remainder, Fernández takes a sidelong, subtle approach to the grim realities of life in the Chile of her youth, episodes of which, she suggests, figure in her story. A slender story, impressively economical, that speaks volumes about lives torn by repression.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Fernández’s outstanding novel explores the nature of memory and dreams, and how after a certain point, they become indistinguishable.”—Publishers Weekly
“A small jewel of a book. . . . Fernández’s picturesque language and dream-like atmosphere is well worth being invaded by. A book to slip in the pocket to read and reread.”—Patti Smith
“Space Invaders is an absolute gem—a book of uncommon depth, precise in its language, unsparing in its emotion, unflinching as it evokes a past many would prefer to forget. Within the canon of literature chronicling Pinochet’s Chile, Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders is truly unique.”—Daniel Alarcón
“A dark and deceptively playful novel about a generation of Chilean kids who try to understand the terrible country they live in.”—Alejandro Zambra
2019-08-19
Chilean actor and writer Fernández explores the dark years of the Pinochet dictatorship in this affecting portrait of childhood friendship.
Estrella González, 10 years old, appears one morning in 1980 at a Santiago school, her right shoe untied, accompanied by a father distinguished by his officer's cap—a telling detail, for, as Fernández writes, "the new constitution proposed by the military junta was approved by a broad majority." Outside the doors of the school a totalitarian state flourishes, but within it the children who befriend Estrella, bearing names like Zúñiga, Donoso, and Maldonado, are innocent of politics, absorbed by the video game of the title and other childhood pursuits. The Pinochet regime was infamous for "disappearing" its opponents, but in this slim novella it is Estrella who disappears: "The desk at the back of the classroom sits empty now. For some reason, the girl never occupies it again." That reason remains hazy, but Estrella reappears in occasional letters and in dreams as her friends grow into young adulthood and take on political lives of their own. Slowly, page after page, the reader learns of the tragedies that beset Estrella, who signs her letters with a star—the meaning of her name in Spanish—even as she reveals bits and pieces of her life: "I should try to obey my dad. He deserves to be obeyed, for me to obey him." Dad has everything to do with Estrella's sudden departure from school and her friends' lives; later, the dictatorship finally ends, but the violence of everyday life continues, lending a tragic end to a story that has hitherto unfolded quietly and with only occasional moments of drama. Like compatriot Alia Trabucco Zerán's recently published novel The Remainder, Fernández takes a sidelong, subtle approach to the grim realities of life in the Chile of her youth, episodes of which, she suggests, figure in her story.
A slender story, impressively economical, that speaks volumes about lives torn by repression.
